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Software

The BubbleBoard designed to use Free Software (free as in freedom, and
often but not necessarily free-of-charge). Wikipedia has a lot to say on the
subject (search-words: Linux, Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman,
Debian, GNU). Being an Open Source venture, other developers may make programs
available to you (almost always free-of-charge). You will find useful URL's on the Links page.

We use
a Debian Linux distribution, and the Yaffs file-system.

THE BUBBLEBOARD(S) ARE J-TAGGED BEFORE DESPATCH.

The www.balloonboard.org site should be read with a little caution. It is a wiki, which means that it is written by many people; much has accumulated over the years, and many of the pages are historic. All pages are confusing (guaranteed).

All first-time buyers should order a mating connector, which enables you to power up the board from your own 5VDC power-supply and to get the board to the Hello world stage via a console on the board.

YAFFS

YAFFS uses journaling, error correction and verification techniques tuned to the
way NAND typically fails, to enhance robustness. It works within the constraints
of, and exploit the features of, NAND flash to maximise performance. The result
is a file-system that exploits low-cost NAND chips and is both fast and robust. Seeyaffs.net

Source code

We have moved all our code into a
centrally-organised sub-version repository. You can browse this online using
viewcvs, or get direct svn read-only access at svn://balloonboard.org/, e.g. svn
checkout svn://balloonboard.org/balloon/trunk/ to check out the mainline code.
Currently the working bootldr is under balloon/branch, and everything else under
trunk. If you have a developer account then read/write access is available over
ssh at svn+ssh://balloonboard.org/home/balloon/svn/.

Binaries

Binaries for the various boards and releases are available by http or using rsync
from balloonboard.org::balloon

The current Balloon3 debian-based release is
available here. The easiest way to download just the binaries is by doing rsync
-av --compress balloonboard.org::balloon/balloon3/distro/test-v0.3/binaries

BalloonSoftwareLoading is the place to start with info on how to fill you
balloon with the latest code.

BalloonArmLinux has an overview of the
distribution.

Toolchains

Most developers are using the cross toolchains provided by Emdebian. Some
tarballs suitable for developers on non-debian machines will appear on the balloonboard.org site
shortly.